WARNING.
THIS MAY BE A THREAD THAT YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ...
How late can you start playing golf & how good can you become?
Anyone happen to know which of the top-1000 on the OWGR who picked up a club at the latest age - or if any of the PGA TOUR players started playing quite late in life?
That or any related story on the topic of "starting out late & obtaining HCP 0" would be really interesting.
(Would also be interesting to learn of any scientific proof/study that indicates whether motoric skills are developed up to a certain age, and can not significantly be developed thereafter - and are crucial for good golf)
The former Swedish tennis champion, Mats Wilander, comes to mind. He once (seriously) said he wanted to become the first to win the US Open in tennis and golf. LOL
(All the above said after just having beaten my personal best by 4 full shots (by 5 on that specific course, my home course) - but not in order to boost my hybris. I don't need that right now, I need a reality check ).
Last edited by metallion : 06-17-2008 at 12:59 PM.
Nelson and Peete are the only 2 I can think of who started playing in their 20's.
Jerry Kelly didn't get serious till college.
I have been on a quest to get this questioned answered for 2 years.
I know it is different. How does an adult go about learning an efficient golf swing? Kids have it easy....the power of imitation is great, but we start losing it when we turn 18 or so. Then our analytical side takes over and when that happens you are doomed at high level golf unless there was a system to overcome it. It has been said that you need to be really smart or really stuipid to play golf at a high level.
I picked up a club for the first time when I was 20 and my college baseball team went to the driving range for fun. I got serious about golf when I turned 25.
Here I am 7 yrs. later and I am a 5 handicap. But...I still piece it together every round. Some days I putt great, some days I hit a lot of greens. The only thing I can really say I am "good" at is chipping and pitching.
To me this would be the holy grail of golf....how to get an adult to regain the imitative powers of youth. Would hypnosis work? Or a detailed program to learn as an adult?
This document (page 12) discusses performance for juggling and lacrosse pre-test and post-instruction for various ages. Pretty interesting. A similar study on golf is definetely out there - somewhere.
Sidenotes:
Remember that someone (Yoda?) once told me that he had observed how 3-year olds would pick up a club & automatically swing it with a straight left arm and extensor action. Except the hitters, maybe. LOL
Obviuosly good or great results can be obtained with practice. But how good?
Obviously golf is the game of games played on (almost) any level, but don't give me that
WARNING.
THIS MAY BE A THREAD THAT YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ...
How late can you start playing golf & how good can you become?
Anyone happen to know which of the top-1000 on the OWGR who picked up a club at the latest age - or if any of the PGA TOUR players started playing quite late in life?
That or any related story on the topic of "starting out late & obtaining HCP 0" would be really interesting.
(Would also be interesting to learn of any scientific proof/study that indicates whether motoric skills are developed up to a certain age, and can not significantly be developed thereafter - and are crucial for good golf)
The former Swedish tennis champion, Mats Wilander, comes to mind. He once (seriously) said he wanted to become the first to win the US Open in tennis and golf. LOL
(All the above said after just having beaten my personal best by 4 full shots (by 5 on that specific course, my home course) - but not in order to boost my hybris. I don't need that right now, I need a reality check ).
But Lendl is nowhere near as good as Wilander though. Lendl is a scratch player, but Wilander was better than that.
It is hard to teach adults how to drive even.
I read a report somewhere that if the legal driving age were pushed back to 18 or 21 our society would actually have worse drivers, because it is a skill that needs to be learned without a lot of analytical thought, it needs to be felt and adults lose the ability to feel.
I believe Larry Nelson began sometime in his 20's!
True.
Larry Nelson began playing golf at age 21 upon his return from Army service in Vietnam. He broke 70 in his first year and won the PGA Championship twelve years later (and the U.S. Open two years after that).
I asked him in his prime if his goal was to become the game's greatest player.
"Well," he said with a little smile, "maybe the greatest player who ever started at 21."
I think that great golf becomes more difficult as you pick up the game in your 20s/30s/40s is that you're too intellectually involved and too physically strong to stay out of your own way. Little kids swing the way they do in large part because of a lack of strength, flexibility to burn, and they aren't trying to follow a multitude of swing thoughts. From what I've seen and read, adults who experience a lot of success quickly are almost all application, and very little theory. They spend more time making the ball do what they want it to do, and less time reading about it in magazines, etc. I've not only read about it, I've experienced it first hand.
- but not in order to boost my hybris. I don't need that right now, I need a reality check ).
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